Charles Bernstein

Introduction to Louis Zukofsky: Selected Poems

American Poets Project of the Library of America (2006)

The melody! the rest is accessory: …
My one voice. My other: is
An objective – rays of the object brought to a focus,
An objective – nature as creator – desire for what is objectively perfect
Inextricably the direction of historic and contemporary particulars

— from “A”-6

Louis Zukofsky is the most formally radical poet to emerge among the
second-wave modernists who composed in the wake of such
first-generation innovators as Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens,
James Joyce, William Carlos Williams, and Gertrude Stein. Each one of
these older poets was an important source for Zukofsky, whose response
to his modernist predecessors was precise and comprehensive. In place
of a sometimes overwhelming monumentalism of “the” great poem, Zukofsky emphasized the need for “a”
series of poems. He rejected the major keys for minor chords,
universals for particulars, the grandiose for discreteness. In the
process, he created a ravishing, yet sometimes forbidding, body of work
notable for its intricacy of detail as well as for its resistance to
sweeping pronouncements and vague generalizations. Zukofsky’s poetry is
both emotional and accessible, but it demands much of its readers
because of its refusal to separate intellect from feeling, or
complexity from clarity.
Louis Zukofsky was born in 1904 on the Lower East Side of New York, the
child of Yiddish-speaking parents who had emigrated from Russia (or,
more precisely, Lithuania), just before Louis was born. His father
Pinchos (ca. 1860-1950) and mother Chana (1862-1927) figure
significantly in his work.

Zukofsky attended Columbia University, part of the unprecedented spike
in Jewish students admitted to Ivy League colleges immediately after
World War I, following the introduction of test-based admissions. At
Columbia, Zukofsky studied with Mark Van Doren, already a prominent
poet, and John Dewey, the philosopher so influential for artists of
Zukofsky’s and the immediately subsequent generation. A precocious
student, he was only 20 when he got his M.A., writing a dissertation on
Henry Adams. (Zukofsky never got his B.A., having failed to take a
necessary phys. ed. class.) While at Columbia, Zukofsky’s closest
literary comrade was Whittaker Chambers, who at the time was involved
with the Communist Party, but who later turned on his fellow travelers
on the left, becoming famous as one of Alger Hiss’s principal accusers.

Among the first-wave modernists, Pound cast the biggest shadow
for Zukofsky. In 1927, the 23-year-old poet sent Pound “Poem
beginning
‘The.’” Pound published it in The Exile and
also recommended that Harriet Monroe let Zukofsky put together
a special number of her magazine, Poetry.
Editing the “‘Objectivists’ 1931” issue
was a turning point for Zukofsky, firmly establishing his “objectivist” aesthetic
in both his lead essay and his selection of poets, including
several who, along with Lorine Niedecker, whom he met a few years
later, would become his most significant companions-in-poetry – George
Oppen, Charles Reznikoff, and the British poet Basil Bunting.

Zukofsky supported himself in a decidedly ad-hoc manner until
1934, when he got a research job with a federal works program and soon
after with the Works Projects Administration (WPA), where he stayed
until 1942, most significantly working on a history of American
handicrafts. He met Celia Thaew in 1933 and they were married six years
later. The Zukofskys had one child, Paul, born in 1943, the same year
Louis left the WPA to work as a substitute public school teacher and a
technical writer. Paul and Celia, both musicians, figure prominently in
Zukofsky’s poems, most movingly in the lyric rondo “A”-11.
(Paul went on to become a prominent violinist and conductor.) Moreover,
domestic themes become more pronounced in Zukofksy’s poems written
after the Second World War.

In 1947, he took a job as an instructor in the English Department of
the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, where he would teach until
retiring in 1966. For most of his life, Zukofsky lived in the heart of
New York City and certainly his poems are as much in, of, and about New
York – itself an urban collage of energy 24 hours each day – as
anything else. In 1972, the Zukofskys moved to Port Jefferson, New
York, on Long Island. Zukofsky died there in 1978.

±±±

After a prescient early poem from 1922, the selection of Zukofsky’s
poems included in this volume begins with three of the six movements of
“Poem beginning ‘The.’” The complete poem begins with an untranslated
epigraph (in Persian) by Omar Khayyám, followed by a full page of
sources given by name and line. “Poem beginning ‘The’” is a powerful
response to Eliot’s 1922 The Waste Land;
its list of sources is a wry comment on Eliot’s appended notes to his
poem – but that is just an opening gambit. “Poem beginning ‘The’”
anticipates many of the major formal and thematic concerns in much of
Zukofsky’s subsequent work. Composed of 333 separately numbered lines,
including one left blank, the poem is a masterpiece of pointillist
collage, in which the basic unit of composition, the numbered line, is
allowed to stand by itself, discrete, while simultaneously being
stitched together with the other lines. This concern for the relation
of part to the whole – specifically, that the part is neither consumed
by the whole nor isolated from it – is a key aspect of Zukofsky’s
poetics and politics. Thematically, the poem addresses a central
concern for the immigrant generation: the problem of assimilation,
both cultural and poetical.

In contrast to Eliot, Zukofsky’s list of sources is ethnically
inflected, local, comic, as well as deeply responsive to the canon of
British poetry. In particular, Zukofsky gives prominent mention to, and
translates, the Yiddish-American poet Yehoash (Solomon Bloomgarden),
most famous for his Yiddish translation of the Torah. “Poem beginning
‘The’” raises the problem of the poet, through his newly acquired,
lofty education, his socialist views, and his atheism, losing
connection with his religious familial culture. This is evident,
especially in its poignant address to Zukofsky’s mother in the fifth
movement of the poem, “Autobiography,” – “If horses but could sing
Bach, mother, – / Remember how I wished it once – / Now I kiss you who
could never sing Bach, never read Shakespeare.” In contrast to Pound
and Eliot, Zukofsky – from this earliest poem – recognized the founding
significance of difference for American poetry. The final lines of
“Autobiography” are emblematic: “Keine Kadish wird man sagen.” The
passage is adapted from Heinrich Heine’s “Gedächtnisfeier” (Memorial) –
“Keine Messe wird man singen, / Keinen Kadosch wird man sagen, / Nichts
gesagt und nichts gesungen / Wird an meinen Sterbetagen” (“No Mass will
anyone sing / Neither Kaddish will anyone say / Not said and not sung /
When I lay dead”). These same issues are addressed in the
excerpts included from “A”-12, where Zukofsky’s
father figures prominently.

±±±

Louis Zukofsky’s poems operate within an interval that
he describes, in “A”-12,
as “Lower limit speech / Upper limit music.” The music of poetry, in
Zukofsky’s sense, refers to the intricate patterning of sound that
everywhere pervades his work. This poetry leads with sound and you can
never go wrong following the sound sense, for it is only after you hear
the words that you are able to locate their meanings. In other words,
these poems are not representations of ideas but enactments of thoughts
in motion, articulated as sound. Zukofsky loved to create patterns,
some of which are apparent and some of which operate subliminally.
Often in reading one of his poems, you can sense multiple patterns at
play; indeed, reading Zukofsky induces this sensation. But these poems
are not multi-dimensional crossword puzzles: no solution is required,
or, for that matter, even desired. The experience made possible through
the crafting of the poems is “when the meanings are” (as
Emily Dickinson puts it): the meaning is not behind the words
but in the words as they unfold, and refold, in the ear.

Often Zukofsky’s poems have no speaker; they are what
are, things in the world, handmade. I’s (pronounced eyes) (the
title of one of Zukofsky’s collections of short poems)
is his now-classic formulation for the I that becomes
an other. The I in the eye, and the eye in I (aye
aye; the ayes have it). In Zukofsky’s lyric, the personally
expressive poem is not replaced by the poem as thing seen (recall
Pound’s injunction to use no word that does not
contribute to the sense of a thing seen). For Zukofsky, it’s
all about toggling: between I and I, it and we, eye and you,
seen and unseen, present and absent, here and there; a re-doubling-as-re-doubting
of the senses.
“See sun, and think shadow” (#21, Anew).

Zukofsky’s poems-as-objects are not impersonal so much
as autonomous; “small (or large) machine[s] made of words” (Williams);
“nature as creator” (“A”-6). There
is no better example of self-reflectivity in poetry than #20
of Anew,
a poem that does what it says it’s doing: “The tune’s
image holding in the line.” Thinking in psychoanalytic
terms, the “objectivist” poem is
a transitional object, a thing that takes its meaning by means
of our relation to it. Or to put it more baldly: the materiality
in Zukofsky’s
poetry is always a social materiality. It’s not a matter
of what it says, but of what it is; or, better, it is not a matter
of what it is, but of what it does. Words are things too, and
in Zukofsky’s
poetry they have a heft, a stuffness, a thickness that we can
count on and which counts on us. These poems are not well-wrought
urns but crystalline vessels of light; when we hold them in our
hands we see our hands.

±±±

Immediately following “Poem Beginning ‘The,’” we
present a spectrum of Zukofsky’s short poems, from the
late 1920s to the early 1960s. These poems build their meaning
one word at a time, the words tug at you as soon as you let the
poem take you in tow. These short lyrics are not about overhearing
but hearing again; each word, like a stone dropped in a pond,
creates a ripple around it. The intersecting ripples on the surface
of the pond are the pattern of the poem. Listen for the figures
rather than try to figure anything out.

In September, 2004, before a standing-room only crowd at the
Zukofsky centennial at Columbia and Barnard, Peter Quartermain
spoke of “Thinking with the Poem,” citing “The,” from After
I’s (1961-1964):

The

The
desire
of
towing

“A one-word title,” Quartermain noted. “Followed by four one-word
lines. … Zukofsky explained to [Ian Hamilton] Finlay that he’d been
thinking of tugboats, which tow
very seriously.” Zukofsky also pointed out the modulating vowel sounds
in the poem. The kind of microtonal attention required of a Zukofsky
poem is not a matter of deciphering but of close listening, of evenly
hovering attention to the sonic, linguistic, and lexical dimensions of
the poem, as much for their discrepant engagements as for their fit. I
love the simple fact of the title, The, by the author of “A.” In his talk Quartermain asked: Is “A” pronounced ay or uh? Eh? And now we have another poem beginning “The.” Is the title pronounced thuh or thee? Beats me. Both. Syllable count: 1/2/1/2. Tow the line?; but, they say it’s supposed to be toe the line. So much depends upon . . . whether you want to be towed, since this is the desire not a desire. Now, go back to the image: Tiny tug drags large barge.
Perhaps this poem’s a counter-poetics: Do you want a poem to tow you or
to do some towing yourself? A Zukofsky poem does not tow you along for
a ride; that’s what Quartermain means by emphasizing “thinking with the poem.” In contrast to the desire of towing, we might speak of a desire not to be towed. Or anyway, told.

Perhaps Zukofsky’s most exquisite realization of the microtonal
shifting of vowels in one of his permutational poems, or rounds, is the
Valentine “Songs of Degrees,” which creates constellations among nine
seed words: hear, her, clear, mirror, care, error, in, his, is.
There is a moebius effect as the same words shift from noun to verb.
Another striking example of word-by-word permutation, approaching
fugue, is “Julia’s Wild,” from Bottom: on Shakespeare, whose multiple variants of the word order and phrasing of this eight-word, decasyllabic string: come- shadow- come- and - take - this - shadow - up, is a tour-de-force of polymetrical imagination in its aversion of (not to) pentameter.

At the other side of the spectrum from “The” and “Songs of Degree”
is “Mantis,” a much-cited poem from 1934, not included in this
selection. The elaborate conceit of the piece is a praying mantis “lost
in the subway” – “fact,” Zukofsky notes, not “symbol,” of the
“oppression” and “helplessness” of the poor. In his most explicitly
proletarian mode, the author produced the single work of his that is
most conducive to New Critical close reading. Indeed, “Mantis” displays
how Zukofsky is able to use the closed-form sestina as a means for
social reflection:

Mantis! praying mantis! since your wings’ leaves
And your terrified eyes, pins, bright, black and poor
Beg—“Look, take it up” (thought’s torsion)! “save
it!”
I who can’t bear to look, cannot touch, —You—
You can—but no one sees your steadying lost
In the cars’ drafts on the lit subway stone.
…
Fly, mantis, on the poor, arise like leaves
The armies of the poor, strength: stone on stone
And build the new world in your eyes, Save it!

More remarkable, however, is “Mantis, An Interpretation,” Zukofsy’s extensive commentary-in-verse, which suggests the insufficiency of the
poem and the necessity for interpretation – not as closure but as
dialectical method for opening the word’s work into a social world:
“The mantis might have heaped up upon itself a / Grave of verse, / But
the facts are not a symbol.” The final lines of the poem do not
represent an idea but enfold “the simultaneous, / The diaphanous,
historical / in one head.” As if directly confronting Kafka, Zukofsky
wryly concludes: “No human being wishes to become / An insect for the
sake of a symbol.”

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“A” is Zukofsky’s lifelong long poem
in 24 parts, one for each hour of the day, written from 1928
to 1974 (though not in chronological order). The complete poem
runs about 800 pages in the Johns Hopkins University Press edition.
Most of the movements begin with an A or an an. “A” is
a serial collage, an explicit turning away from Pound’s
desire, in the Cantos, for montage, for the parts to cohere.
As such, “A” opens a “z-sited path” (“A”-23)
for the long serial poems of Zukofsky’s most immediate
heirs in the following generation – Robert Creeley, Robert
Duncan, Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser, Hannah Weiner, Charles Olson,
Larry Eigner, and Jerome Rothenberg. Ideas in “A” are
not proclaimed but threaded into successions of voicings. The
sources, themes, and forms in “A” are plural
and overlaid; there is much taken from daily life, much from
family life, many literary and philosophical threads, alongside
explicitly addressed political and aesthetic commitments. These
are Zukofsky’s “historic and contemporary particulars,” which
together make up a tissue of allusion and articulation that is
everywhere localized and embodied in and as the
poem.

“A”-1 – first word “A” – opens on the night of April 5, 1928 –
both the first night of Passover and Good Friday – at a
performance of the St. Matthew Passion at Carnegie Hall. Bach weaves through “A,” whose
intricate pattern of recurrences, recapitulations, and extensions
can be compared, at least metaphorically, to the form of a fugue – from
the chordal arrangement of syllables to the recurrences both
between and within the movements of the work.

“There’s naw-thing / lak po—ee try,” Zukofsky
writes in “It’s a
gay li – ife,” “it’s a delicacy / for
a horse.” Is this the horse
Zukofsky evokes in “Poem Beginning ‘The,’” the
one he told his mother he wished could sing Bach? “A”-7
returns to horses – there are many plays on horse in
Zukofsky – here it’s
police saw-horses closing a street, sawhorses that look like
a capital letter “A” in this poem of seven sonnets.

“A” -9 is the crux of “A” – a supreme realization of what
Zukofsky called “rested totality”; that is, “desire for what is
objectively perfect.” The poem takes its form, and rhyme scheme,
directly from Calvalcanti’s “Donna Mi Prega,” which had also been the
subject of an influential translation by Pound. “A”-9 has two halves,
written, respectively, before and after Word War II. The second half of
the poem is a mirror image of the first. Its sources include Marx and
Spinoza (the two liminal figures for secular American Jewish thought),
as well as a scientific treatise on quantum physics (related scientific
material is also found in “It’s hard to see but think of a sea,” #12
of Anew, included in this volume). “A”-9’s intricate system
of patterning goes from its eleven-syllable lines, mostly in
sonnet-length stanzas, to what Zukfosky called the “conical” distribution
of n’s and r’s, to the syntactic rotation
of the same words shifting to different parts of speech (as in the
“Songs of Degrees” and “Julia’s Wild”). “A”-9
presents the shimmering figure of a crystal turning on its axis
to an imagined beat, leaning leftward, arriving at song. The
poem’s recurrent motif is for a
rescaling of values toward that which is created by “hands” and
“hearts” – that is, by the production of good and goods made by human
hands; rather than by commodity value, that is, by how much a thing is
sold for. “Labor as creator,” as Zukofsky puts it
in”A”-8, from the 1930s.

±±±

One outtake from”A”-9 is the hilarious
and charming “A
Foin Lass Bodders,” a translation of “Donna Mi Prega” into Brooklynese.
“A”-15 begins its second stanza with a homophonic
translation of The Book of Job:
if you listen closely you can almost hear the Hebrew percolating
through the English: “He neigh ha lie low”; but this is also a horse’s
song (its neigh), or “An hinny,” which is not only a backside but a cross between a “she-ass” and
a stallion.

Zukofsky’s iconoclastic approach to translation would
flower with Catullus, which he wrote with Celia Zukofsky,
working on it from 1958-1966. For Catullus,
the Zukofskys developed a technique that has come to be called
homophonic translation – translation with special emphasis
to the sound rather than the lexical meaning. Since Latin and
English share many cognates, the results are sometimes uncannily
resonant, even passionate, versions, of the original poems. It
is worth comparing the Zukofskys’ versions of the poems
with the Catullus originals, which is easy enough to do since
editions of Catullus are available online and in print. The number
for each poem is the same (note that #22 of Anew, included
here, is an early version Catullus 8).

Newly say dickered my love air my own would marry me all
whom but me, none see say Jupiter if she petted.
Dickered: said my love air could be o could dickered a man too
in wind o wet rapid a scribble reported in water.

My quasi-literal translation:

None, says my woman, would she want to marry more
than me, not if Jupiter himself insisted.
says: but what a woman says to a smitten lover,
on wind, should be written, on running water

The Zukofsky version is able to take on a certain texture that
brings us closer to the Latin while at the same allowing the
queerness of the original to come out. (Another example
with the Latin original is provided in the notes to this volume.)
Leading with the sound, homophonic translation reframes what
is significant in translation, challenging the idea that the
translation should focus on content or create poems that sound
fluent in their new language. Zukofsky insists that the mark
of the translator be pronounced, and that in making the translation
strange, we may provide a way to come closer to its core.

Following Catullus, Zukofsky completed the remaining
movements of “A,” writing “A”-22
and “A”-23 from 1970 to 1974. He then went
on to 80
Flowers, a work in which the density and overlays of “A”-23,
let’s call it the mulching of sources and reflections,
is extended and formalized. The work consists of 81 poems, each
with eight five-word lines. After 80 Flowers, Zukofsky
planned one more work, Gamut, but was only able to complete
the first poem of the projected series.

±±±

Zukofsky’s work is too varied to create a representative
selection. For this gathering, we have necessarily left out his
prose writings, both essay and fiction (I should have liked to
begin with “An Objective”).
Since “A” is best read as a single long poem
of 24 parts, the scale of that work cannot be reflected here.
In the limited space available, I have tried to give a visceral
sense of a range of formal, thematic, and aesthetic possibilities
that exists within the highly articulated constellation of Zukofsky’s
work as a whole.

The selection is built around three long poems that are included:
First, “Poem Beginning ‘The’,” inaugural
for second-wave (Jewish) modernism. Second, “4 Other Countries,” based
on a European trip Zukofsky took in 1957, with its capacious
range of references and locations, and also its intimation of
the five-word line. (Williams expressed his enthusiastic response
to this poem in a letter that was very encouraging to Zukofsky.)
Last, the late, majestically refractive (not to say sublimely
refractory) “A”-23,
with its 1000 five-word lines, Zukofsky’s most linguistically
radical achievement and a foundational work for the thickly textual
American poetry of the last part of the 20th century. Those three
works make a perfect interrelated set and key into the other
selections. The unit of composition is not the part but the whole
160-page book: each section must contribute toward that whole
but also hold its own. That is, I have tried to use Zukofsky’s
principle of collage and arrangement in “A”
to create an historically grounded constellation of particulars.
To achieve this goal, it has been necessary to make excerpts
from poems, a precarious practice that is only justified because
it is part of an overall design; excerpts from single movements
of “A,” published by themselves or in an anthology
selection, would not be justified (nor approved by the copyright
holder).

Naturally, many significant poems have had to be omitted. Zukofsky’s
ode to his wash-stand (from 29 Poems)
remains a useful example of the poetics of the common and the
reversal of values from the worship of/at “the” altar
to “a” secular
everyday, with relevance to Reznikoff, for example:

To my wash-stand
in which I wash
my left hand
and my right hand

To my wash-stand
whose base is Greek
whose shaft
is marble and fluted

The first part of the three-line “partita” of “A”-13, with its twirling aphorisms is one of the highlights of “A.” Those seeking out the complete “A” will be sure to take in the turn from one- to two- to three-word lines in “A”-14 and the full flowering, in “A”-22, of the five-word line (often in stanzas of five lines) that is a basic unit of late Zukofsky. “A”-22
starts with what has become something of a signature piece for
Zukofsky, a Valentine tercet, made with 9 vowels and 9 consonants that
concatenate multiple plays on era/anno/aer/are, and on a/an/any, and
also on year/ear; perhaps you can hear, mirrored, an error in that other poem for Valentine time, “Songs of Degrees.” A round of these six words shows the care in all to come anon.

AN ERA
ANY TIME
OF YEAR

__________I am grateful to a number of people who made
suggestions about the selection of the poems, including, Ron Silliman,
Bob Perelman, David Wray, Geoffrey O’Brien, and Michele Leggott.
Special thanks to Paul Zukofsky, for suggestions small and large; Mark
Scroggins, Zukofsky’s biographer, who is a prime source and support for
all Zukofsky scholarship; and to Peter Quartermain, for his clear care.
I also want to take this opportunity to thank Michael Golsten for the
work he did on LZ/100.

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